my buffy the vampire slayer was always crashing exactly at the point where it was supposed to load my saved game. it would start loading (or summoning as it's called in buffy) and then give me the dirty disk message 100% of the time. i was getting really pissed, and i thought someone had sold me a disk with a bad image on it. then i figured out that if i just let the game just completely do it's thing on startup, in other words, not skip any of the intros, let it show the complete startup demo, etc. and then wait a few additional seconds (just to be safe) before going to the load game screen, it works flawlessly every time. i'm not sure if this might help with other games or not, but i figured i would spread the word. fyi, my chip is a homebrew w/ evoltion x on it.:tup:

nah loons fight for fame always seems to knacker on the screen just after character select, no matter how long it took to get there (Only on a version put onto a menu though)

has anyone else found this??

I got the same problem with loons, but one thing strange is that the same DVD-R and mod chip work well without any problem in a very early version xbox, but always failed in a newly build xbox in early 2002. It seems that there were some minor difference in these different xbox versions.
I told this strange thing to EvolutionX team and hopefully they can start to investigate this issue and find the solution for us.

This method works for Collin Mcrae Rally 3.
The CMR3 don't work on v1.1 xbox, always hang while entering the game play. I let the start up movie played and wait for a period of time, then it worked! great.
Unfortunately NBA inside drive and Lord of ring still don't work on v1.1 xboxes.